Practising Adobe After Effects.

In my current lesson, I have been practising making an animation in Adobe After Effects. I had imported a triangle, square and circle shapes into After Effects so that I could get a feel on how this program works in order to be able to create future animations. I had started off by Layering my images into the editor at the bottom of the screen. I also went into ‘Layer’ then ‘new’, ‘null object’ so that I could put in an empty null object. I needed to make my shapes a child to this null object so that I could scale and rotate all of these shapes together without overlapping each other. To do this, there is a swirly icon on each layer, click and drag this to the null object that you have made. In doing this, changing the scale, rotation and location of the null object will work with all objects you want to change.

The final step is putting the keyframes in. Click on the arrow near the number left of the object name to show some options then press the arrow on transformation. Now you can make any changes to the shapes. It’s best to experiment when trying new features so that you can an idea of how things work. Next to where it says the name of the movement is such as scale, there should be a stopwatch icon next to it, click this icon and it will set a keyframe. Don’t click it again afterwards as it will undo any keyframes you have made. Any changes to the layer such as rotating the shape will automatically place a keyframe when the stopwatch icon is blue.